Quotes from Josephine Tey

Perhaps the old saying is true and it is not possible to love and be wise.

She had bought herself a fashionable hat for the occasion, but had done nothing to accommodate it; so that the hat perched on her bird's-nest of ginger hair as if it had dropped there from an upper window as she walked along the street. She was wearing her normal expression of pleased bewilderment and no make-up.

A 'full' life in my experience is usually full only of other people's demands

before night,' as Nanny used to say of too exuberant children.

Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.

I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.' And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.

You think he belonged to the type who can't live with themselves any more." "What a good description! Yes. The kind who want something badly, and then discover that the price they have paid for it is too high.

There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought.

Attainder was

A pleasant country, England, at ten of a bright morning. Even the awful little suburban villas had lost that air of aggressiveness born of their inferiority complex

La verdad es la hija del tiempo.

I felicitate Richard Plantagenet." "I'm positively beginning to like the guy.

If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep," he said, "it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience." "I'm going with Nurse Burrows." "You can still hold hands." "I've no patience with you," she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education.

A matter of habit, didn't Mr. Sanger think? After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And if that wasn't riches he didn't know what was.

the granting of the right to bail, and the prevention of the intimidation of juries.' 'Was that Richard's Parliament?

bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his

children. She came up behind them along the field path from the church, and was dismayed by some quality of loveliness, of youth, that belonged to their gaiety. A quality that was not apparent in any communion between Liz and Walter.

Used to the technical standards of international ballet, she had not allowed in her mind for the inevitable amateurism of dancing in this milieu. In everything she had seen the students do so far they had been the best of their line in the business; professionals. But it was obviously not possible to give to other subjects the time and energy that they did and still reach a high standard as dancers. Dancing was a whole-time job.

Only historians tell you what they thought. Research workers stick to what they did.

Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.

But no, Potticary, poor fool, brushed his boots for love of it. He probably had a slave mentality; but had never read enough for it to worry him.

Because I've not written a book before, you mean?" "No, that doesn't matter at all. Most people's first books are their best anyway; it's the one they wanted most to write. No